Shopping for a VPN

Last week, Congress voted to kill FCC regulations that would have prevented ISPs from selling your personal browser history ... This week, President Trump signed that bill into law. Interest in VPNs has skyrocketed as a result, but at least a few scam companies are trying to take advantage of the trend.

If your friends and family are considering a VPN, or if you want to test one yourself, make certain you are dealing with a reputable company with some proven time in the business. We’ve written our own guide to VPN services and I’ve personally had good luck with GoldenFrog’s VyprVPN as well. Be on the lookout for deals that seem too good to be true, advertise free or very low-cost rates (some of these have proven to be scams as well), or that claim to be affiliated with companies that haven’t previously had a VPN product. I have no doubt we’ll see more companies launching VPN services, but look for areas of overlap with existing products that company already offers.

Finally, be aware of some of the limitations of using VPN services. Netflix may or may not work, web surfing in general may be slower, torrents may not function properly, and on some services, performance during peak access time can slow to a crawl. A good VPN provider should have measures in place to address these shortcomings, but proper research is essential.

It can be overwhelming. It's not as simple as using whatever VPN the security cool kids say is "the one," because even popular services have been behaving badly. For example, popular service Hola VPN recently got caughtselling user traffic to a botnet.